A Robust, Multi-criteria Modeling Approach for Optimizing Aeromedical Evacuation Asset Emplacement

According to current force health protection policy, the U.S. Army’s Health Service Support system is designed to maintain a healthy force and to conserve the combat strength of deployed soldiers. Specifically, this system remains particularly effective by employing standardized aeromedical evacuation assets and providing a responsive field-sited medical treatment facility for the wounded soldiers evacuated from the battlefield. Since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, military commanders have faced a significant combinatorial challenge integrating these life-saving yet limited air evacuation assets into a fully-functional, comprehensive system for the entire theatre, which deserves thorough analysis for decision-making. This work describes a robust, multi-criteria decision analysis methodology using a scenario-based, stochastic optimization goal-programming model that U.S. Army medical planners can use as a strategic and tactical aeromedical evacuation asset-planning tool to help bolster and improve the current air evacuation system in Afghanistan. Specifically, this model optimizes over a set of expected scenarios with stochastically-determined casualty locations to emplace the minimum number of helicopters at each medical treatment facility necessary to maximize the coverage of the theatre-wide casualty demand and the probability of meeting that demand, while minimizing the maximal medical treatment facility evacuation site total vulnerability to enemy attack.